Thanksgiving special

I spent a few hours last night and today sorting through nearly 300 photos I took over the weekend and assembling a gallery of 45 images. Here is a brief guide to the gallery:

• Frame 1. Our driveway.


• Frames 2-4, 17, 20-23. Scenes along Haliburton County Road 12 on Saturday morning. The sky was overcast, but the colours were still spectacular. I took a couple interesting portraits of Brenna on the roadside.
  
• Frames 5-16. Partway along this route, Marian, Brenna and I got out and walked to the dam at the bottom of our lake. I took a series of closeup photos of leaves by the stream.
  
• Frames 17-19. These are out of sequence, taken at about 5:30 p.m. on Saturday when the clouds briefly broke and I took some interesting sky pictures. The views are across Lake Fletcher from our neighbours' docks.
  
• Frames 23-24. Brenna and I went for a short walk along our road before dinner.
  
• Frames 25-27. Sunday morning: a chickadee and a chipmunk picking up sunflower seeds outside our living room window.
  
• Frames 28-41. Sunday afternoon the sky cleared for a few hours. Dad and I took a boat tour around Lake Fletcher so I could take some pictures of the spectacular fall colour.
  
• Frames 42-45. The weather turned fine in time for me and the girls to leave on Monday afternoon. Here's one family shot, and three pictures taken along the road home.
  

The LJ pics site is a little less reliable than LJ itself, so in case you have trouble viewing it or don't want to take the full tour, this post features six of my favourite images, stored elsewhere.

The image of Brenna above shows a pose so characteristic of her that we joke about her being one of the Mystics from The Dark Crystal. Frivolity aside, I feel priveleged to have so much beauty in my life.

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Taking Marian to school

Marian has a funny way of stringing words together sometimes. As we drove along the cottage road Friday evening, she asked: "Will the aunt of the peoples be coming?"

I couldn't comprehend her meaning at first. Ant of the people?

"The dog of the parsley?" I said to her. "The pillbug of the elephants?"

We cut to giggling. It turned out she was asking about my cousin, Catherine. Mom had said my cousin would join us for dinner one night this weekend, but in fact Catherine had never confirmed. Marian couldn't remember my cousin's name, only that she was the aunt of two other children who visited the cottage a couple summers ago. That's how Marian dug up the ambiguous phrase, "aunt of the peoples." Catherine didn't come, so we were alone for the weekend: me, Marian and Brenna, my parents, Potvin the cat, and Emma.

Emma is my parents' alpha female golden retriever. I prefer to call her Embolism, but rarely aloud. This weekend Marian and I came up with another nick, "Emer the Lemur." It's the way we relate, with crazy language and turns of phrase.

All the way home yesterday afternoon we concocted likely titles for the last two books in J.K. Rowling's notorious series.

Harry Potter and the Penguin of Death

Harry Potter and the Pedestrian Conspiracy

After we dropped off Brenna, I took Marian to her new boarding school. It was a strange experience. For the past six years, since they moved to Lindsay, I have had no firsthand experience of my daughters' school. Their mother clearly didn't want me interfering, so I didn't.

Now things have changed. Marian is older, she has more say about what happens in her life. She wants me involved. So there we were, driving up a country lane to a few brick buildings in the middle of nowhere. I opened the trunk, lifting out her luggage: a suitcase, a couple bags of fresh laundry, a heavy bag of books, a tupperware container full of banana muffins I had baked that morning, and her new guitar.

Yes, she has had a new guitar for a week, and is doing an amazing job of catching on. No lessons yet; her teacher is away in Virginia. Already she has learned the "Ode to Joy." The first line was in her lesson book; she picked out the rest by ear.

"I hate that song," she said. But she kept playing until it was perfect.

She spent hours leaning over the strings, plucking, playing, annoying her sister. And I remember how I loved to play the piano, started lessons when I was 13. All the thunder and lightning of classical pieces, landscapes of sound in which I could lose my heart and soul, draining the anxiety and demands of life, letting rain wash keys across strings of my mind.

Marian and I walked around the campus. She is happy there. She is 12. She showed me the art studio, the haunted chapel, the horses standing like statues on a green hillside. All the while, the sun set in a red-gold valley haze of maples.

Driving away in the dusk, with stars blinking into the deepening sky, I felt that familiar tearing. It seems my life has more goodbyes than hellos, but I know it's an illusion. The departures are simply more weighty.

One morning this weekend I dreamt I had been kidnapped by a band of terrorists. It started with a sex scene in a bathhouse, then my lover turned on me, arrested me. The next moment in the hall I was surrounded by men in police uniforms, but their credentials were false. Turned out to be a ring of criminals. The dream carried on through a series of scenarios in which I was different men trying to secretly help the me who had been kidnapped. Every time my lover was a member of the gang, and I had to betray him to save myself.

In one of the last scenes I was keeping a handwritten journal, but it was connected to the internet. I had to figure out how to encode messages in my journal so that people reading it would be able to understand them, but without alerting members of the gang. I needed to communicate the schematics of a hotel where my prisoner self was hidden.